Stephen Colbert Rips into Rachel Maddow for Toying with Our Emotions

We’re going to tell you why it was funny to see Stephen Colbert imply that Rachel Maddow’s big Trump tax-return reveal was all wind-up and no substance. But before we can do that, we have to explain who Stephen Colbert is, who Rachel Maddow is, what can be considered a “implication,” and how, exactly, one should define the word “substance.”

That’s the general gist of this very pointed Late Show segment from Wednesday night, which casts Colbert as a Maddow stand-in who promises to tell his audience “a joke—a joke we can confirm has been heard by Donald Trump.” It’s a familiar quip about a chicken crossing the road—but Colbert can’t get it out until after he’s explained chickens. And roads. And how both may have ties to shadowy Russian oligarchs. (“And where is this road-crossing chicken going? Mar-a-Lago? Is it going to Russia, to be chicken kiev?”)

The point here, and in Colbert’s subsequent fiery monologue, is clear: like many of the others who eagerly tuned in to Maddow’s show Tuesday night, the Late Show host was frustrated to see the MSNBC anchor cycle through “like, 20 minutes of explaining what taxes are and who Donald Trump is”—and more than one commercial break—before finally getting to the point: she had two pages from Trump’s 2005 tax return, which only really revealed that Trump had paid taxes in 2005.

In other words, as Colbert hissed after showing a clip of Maddow vamping: “She’s got nothing.”

Maddow herself has taken the ribbing in stride, retweeting Colbert’s “why did the chicken cross the road?” bit late Wednesday with a good-humored comment.

And though Maddow didn’t address her long lead-in into the tax-return story during her visit to Jimmy Fallon’sTonight Show on Wednesday, she did acknowledge there that there were no real “bombshells” in the returns she examined on air. Instead, Maddow argued on Fallon, the real story here is Trump’s continued resistance to releasing his tax returns—a decision that seems especially puzzling if the rest of them are as normal as the one Maddow got her hands on Tuesday night.

But Colbert doesn’t exactly seem swayed by that line of questioning, either—or by the possibility that, as journalist David Cay Johnston said on Maddow, Trump may have leaked the tax returns himself. That conspiracy theory led Colbert straight to the Kellyanne Conway–inspired microwave camera he introduced on Monday’s show, where he fully examined all the potential implications of this story.

“Maybe Trump did leak his own tax returns, from the year when he actually paid returns, to dispel rumors that he hasn’t paid taxes for 20 years. Or maybe this whole tax thing is just a distraction from the investigation into his connections with Russia, or maybe that’s just a distraction from the fact that Trumpcare’s dead on arrival. If you think about it, it makes sense,” said Colbert, directly into the microwave.

Then, finally, came the punch line: “And if you don’t think about it, it makes even more sense.”